Presented in its 4K restored version last summer at the Locarno Festival, 書かれた顔 The Written Face (1995) offers a fascinating and at times experimental portrait of Bandō Tamasaburō, kabuki actor known in Japan especially for being one of the most talented onnagata ever, a man who plays the role of a woman in traditional Japanese theatre. Bandō has also directed a couple of movies, and appeared as an actor in a number of films, among which I would like to highlight at least 夜叉ヶ池 Demon Pond (1979), an excellent movie by Shinoda Masahiro, with an outstanding performance by Bandō in the double role of a girl and a mythical princess. The Written Face is a Japanese-Swiss coproduction directed by Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid, who assembled together Bandō’s on-stage performances, which make up the bulk of the film, with interviews of artists he was inspired by, such as actress Sugimura Haruko, the face of many works by Ozu and Naruse, dancer Takehara Han, the elderly geisha Tsutakiyokomatsu Asaji, and Ohno Kazuo, the great butoh dancer, subject of another movie directed by Schmid and also released in the same year, Kazuo Ohno (1995). The movie is also punctuated by short interviews with Bandō himself, and wrapped up with a film within a film, Twilight Geisha Story, a short movie without spoken words starring the actor himself in the role of a geisha at the end of her career.
The Written Face opens with Bandō on stage, his performance, however, is filmed from the side and not frontally as seen by the audience. These scenes are alternated with brief passages in which the actor strolls through the streets, or explores the stage and the areas surrounding it, as if he were watching the performance he himself is acting in. Once the show is over, after the roaring applause of the off-camera audience, the film shows Bandō removing his make-up, the white patina covering the face, the wig, the heavy dress, and profusely thanking the musicians. At this point we cut to the actor in plain clothes chatting with a child, probably his young son, who is playing with a portable video game. While the scene itself is very brief and not too significant in itself, when considered in the context of the movie, so far made mainly of acting on stage, ritual gestures and traditional music, it represents a counterpoint that zooms us out of the stage performances, and anchors the film to the time it was filmed, the 1990s. While most of the movie, as written above, is made by the beautifully choreographed performances of Bandō, everything else that surrounds them— interviews, words, and “pillow shots”— functions as an indirect explanation of his artistic approach, and partly as a deconstruction of what is happening on stage. One of the crucial points of the movie is when we first hear Bandō’s voice reflecting on his art and approach. He is sitting in a hotel facing what is probably Osaka Castle at sunset, and explaining to the interviewer what he is trying to express when he takes the stage as onnagata: “I do not represent a woman, but I suggest the essence of women. That is the nature of the onnagata, isn’t?”.
In order to do so, Bandō has often seeked inspiration, throughout his career, from the art of the four aforementioned figures, each of them representing a different and unique type of femininity. A clip from Naruse Mikio’s 晩菊 Late Chrysanthemums (1954) suggests the particular type of femininity, strong and direct, Sugimura often represented in her long and glorious film career. At the other end of the spectrum, the dancing body of Ohno, 88 years old at the time, immersed in the blue of dawn, and surrounded by water, captures and expresses something more ethereal and dreamlike. Ingrained in the nihon-buyō‘s tradition are the dance movements that Takehara performs for the film, delicate, elegant, and almost imperceptible, while the voice of Tsutakiyokomatsu, trembling but still full of life, is a sign of a fierce vitality, she was 101 years old at the time of the shooting.
After the short Twilight Geisha Story, a segment about twenty minutes long, which perhaps represents the weakest part of the work, in the last ten minutes, the movie returns to a kabuki play with Bandō protagonist. The performance is Sagi Musume (1762), also the opening performance of the documentary, one of the most famous and celebrated kabuki play in Japan. It is the story of a girl, abandoned by her lover, who is transformed into a heron and dies on a snowy night. Bandō’s performance is here breathtaking in its beauty.
Fifth part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (4th here, 3rd here, first and second here and here)
The short passages translated below—from 早池峰の賦 published in 1984—are very important and central to properly understand Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and more broadly, Haneda’s approach to documentary filmmaking. Just to provide a bit of background: Haneda discovered yamabushi kagura in 1964 in Tokyo, and the following year, the beauty of the performances and their connection with Tōhōku, when she visited Ōtsugunai, where she attended a kagura performed in an old magariya, an L-shaped farmhouse typical of the area. When she went back to the town in 1977, she noticed how the magariya and the culture associated with them were slowly disappearing from the scenery. She really wanted to start her documentary from a performance held in one of these old houses, an image that had stayed in her mind for decades, but instead she decided to go the opposite direction and started the movie by filming the demolition of one of these old farmhouses. It is interesting to note that, the first and shorter version of the documentary, 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, opens with kagura performed in the entrance of an old house, not a magariya, if I’m not wrong, and that the demolition scene is absent.
NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:
I first became aware of the Tōhoku region when I was in primary school, and read about a famine in the area in a children’s book. I think this was probably about the great famine of 1934. I had completely forgotten what it was about, but the tragic impression stayed with me for a long time. So when I think of the Tōhoku region, the first thing that comes to mind is a dark and impoverished image.
When I thought about making a movie about Hayachine kagura, I thought that Kagura is like a flower that blossoms and has its roots in the soil, that is, the harsh living conditions of the Tōhoku region. The true value of the flower cannot be understood unless it is depicted together with its soil. But how should this soil be expressed? In 1979, this was quite difficult.
When I first visited Ōtsugunai in 1965, the old farmhouses were still there, and the atmosphere of the old times was still strong. However, the rural landscape has now completely changed. Wide paved roads. Large concrete buildings. Houses just like in the city. Colourful tin roofs reflect the sunlight, and there is no longer any sense of history, poverty or darkness. I was at loss in front of this rural landscape.
The image of kagura I had in my mind was the one I saw during my first trip to Ōtsugunai [in 1965 when Haneda attended a kagura performed at the entrance of an old magariya, t/n]. I tried to find a place that somehow came close to that image, and in my mind I was constantly trying to recreate a scene like that. However, I soon began to feel that there was something wrong with obsessing over only old things. I realised that in order to depict the life of kagura, which has continued to live until today, even when the houses are new and the roofs are red, first of all it was important to accurately capture the present life of the farmers, and I also realised it would be a mistake to go too far in pursuing the perfect form, and thus to lose the vitality of the present. I was forced to change my methodology.
I thought that starting the shooting with the destruction of the magariya was quite symbolic. I filmed the demolition of the magariya as a symbol of the transfiguration of the rural areas in the Tōhoku region, but it also became the “demolition” of my own way of thinking. It doesn’t matter if the magariya are no more. It doesn’t matter if the roofs are blue or red. I wanted to make this work as an expression of the spirit of the farmers in Tōhoku, beyond what is visible to the eye, and as an expression of the ever-changing flow of history.
This is the 4th part of an ongoing series of translations dedicated to the writings of Haneda Sumiko (third part here, first and second here and here)
Distributed by Equipe de Cinema, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley) is the second work conceived and directed independently by Heneda Sumiko. The movie was released in 1982 at Iwanami Hall, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later, due to its success, again from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, and more importantly in 1984 Haneda published 早池峰の賦 (Hayachine no fu), a fascinating volume about the origin, production and shooting of the film, how the various versions of the documentary came about, and about her relationship with the people of Take and Ōtsugunai, the two villages where kagura is performed. As for the versions of the documentary, the first one, backed by Iwanami Eiga, is titled 早池峰神楽の里 Hayachine kagura no sato, a 52-minute long film that, among other things, is interesting in that it has a male voice narration, while the following versions have a female one. 早池峰の神楽 Hayachine no kagura is a second version, assembled by Haneda after the previous was completed, using more footage shot during the years, while the third one, 早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine, the version usually screened, is 185 minutes long , and very similar to the second one (195′), that was cut down of 10 minutes in order to be screened at Iwanami Hall. The book was, like the film, an unexpected and moderate success, and the first experience for Haneda writing a volume about one of her films.
In the short passages here translated from the volume 早池峰の賦, Haneda narrates the first steps that led to the conception and production of the documentary. She discovered yamabushi kagura when she attended a performance held in Tokyo in 1964, the following year, together with cameraman Segawa Jun’ichi, she visited the two villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, at the time part of Ōhasama town, where they witnessed the various kagura dances performed, also in a magariya, an old style farmhouse typical of the area. Haneda was so impressed by the area and its atmosphere, the people and the performances, that she decided to make a documentary. She even wrote a provisional script, but was not satisfied with it and so the project was shelved. The chance came again in 1977, after she independently made 薄墨の桜 The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms and gained more confidence in her career as a filmmaker.
NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it:
To make a film I really wanted to shoot, that is, by myself [without the help of a production company, t/n] was for me something like a dream, almost impossible to realize. Thus, when I made The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms as an independent work, it was like a new road was opening in front of my eyes. When I made that movie its subject was one tree, it does not go away and it didn’t require so much time and money to be made, however, this time it was different, the subject was people, and many, since there are about 20 performers in the kagura group. If I wanted to film the kagura, I needed the proper filming equipment and a considerable amount of money, above all, what I needed to make the movie, was the cooperation and the understanding of the kagura performers and the people of the area.
In the early summer of 1977 I visited, after 12 years, the town of Ōhasama. I told Ōhasama’s major, Murata-san, that I wanted to make a film that would not be a documentary about kagura, but would portray the culture, life and spirit of the land that has supported kagura, and that it would be a record of the town that I would make and give to the town. Often people came to the town to film kagura, leaving nothing behind for the people of the area. [in the conversation with the major recollected in the book, there are complaints about NHK troupes coming to the area and leaving soon after the main festival is over, without leaving behind anything, t/n]
The decision to form a group to make a movie was decided only a year and a half after this first meeting with major Murata, in the meantime we had the chance to visit and talk with him many times. (…) At the time I was still a Iwanami Eiga employee, and I was very happy to know Iwanami Eiga provided full support for this personal project. More fortunately, the fundraising campaign was able to secure a certain amount of funding, and Tohoku Electric Power agreed to purchase the film necessary. About a year and a half after meeting the mayor for the first time, on 13 February 1979, the 早池峰神楽の里を作る会 ‘Group for making the film Hayachine kagura no sato’ was established. The mayor himself named the film “Hayachine kagura no sato”, which I thought was not a bad title. The group started its activities with the goal of producing a film with a fund of 30 million yen, and a running time of 50 minutes. I thought that fifty minutes was too short, but the production costs would have been much higher otherwise.
However, it was not so easy to raise money, money could never keep up with the speed of film production, nduring filming and during the finishing touches, we still had to find the money. I still cringe when I think back on all the headaches over money we had during this period. In the end, we managed to reach the target amount in autumn of the following year, a year and a half after we had completed and delivered “Hayachine kagura no sato” to the town. During this period, all the footage shot for the film was fully utilized to produce the three-hour and five-minute Ode to Mt. Hayachine, which was shown at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo, gaining a good reputation and being seen by many people.
The film was screened twice a day at the City Hall. On that day, nearly 1,300 people gathered to watch it enthusiastically. We were thrilled that so many people came to see our film, even though the town had a population of less than 8,000.
The 52-minute film was appreciated by the local people, but the 3 hours and 15 minutes film was appreciated even more. Unexpectedly, a woman from Take told us that it was the first time she could properly see the festival and the kagura performances. Come to think of it, when they are busy with the preparation for the festivals and kagura, the women are so busy in the kitchen, that they don’t have time to watch them. Some of them were impressed that the dancers looked so divine when they danced in the film, even though they are usually normal people very close to them in everyday life. What was most gratifying for us was that many people said they felt proud of their hometown.
We were hesitant to let people see the three-hour 15-minute film we donated to the town, because it was so long, and we weren’t sure if it would work as a film to be released in a theater or not. Even though, I showed it to a few people.
A few months later, I was told that the film would be screened at Iwanami Hall as a film distributed by Equipe de Cinema, and I honestly couldn’t believe it. It was unthinkable that such a documentary film would be shown to the public. We reduced the length of the film to three hours and five minutes in order to be able to screen it at the theater, and named the film Ode to Mt. Hayachine. The title of the film best expresses our feelings about the twists and turns that led to the creation of the documentary.
An overdue return to my movie journal entries, with some interesting documentaries—as always the definition here is quite broad— I’ve watched in the last couple of months.
Oral History (Koizumi Meiro, 2013-2015). Comprised of interviews with people of different ages, Oral History is a fascinating exploration of memory, or the lack of it, through different generations of Japanese. The work starts by highlighting the lack of historical knowledge in young, and not so young, people, and how this disinformation is shaping their opinions about Japan—a process that felt a bit annoying and patronising, especially in the first interviews, if I have to be completely honest. What makes this experimental work interesting though, is the progression that moves it from presenting various and very shorts interviews to focusing, in its last part, solely on a deep conversation about war and personal memories, expatriation, and grief with an old lady of Korean descent. Besides the fascinating interweaving of personal history with macro-history, and the touching stories told by the woman, what I found also interesting is that here is the interviewer who shows the apparent lack of knowledge about history, the history of Koreans in Japan, Osaka to be precise, and the Repatriation Project established at the end of the 1950s by the North Korean government. Everything is made more powerful, at least in 2022, by the aesthetic choice used, filming only the mouths of the people speaking, a decision that after three years of pandemic and masks (here in Japan at least), feels freshly disorienting. (Part of the e-flux online program curated by Julian Ross)
Before the Flood (By Yifan Li, Yu Yan, 2005). The documentary depicts the final weeks of Fengjie, an old city famous because of Li Bai, one of the most renowned poet in Chinese history. Located on the Yangtze River, the city, at the time of filming, was about to be reduced to dust, and its inhabitants were forced to relocate, in order to make way to the new Three Gorges Dam that would eventually flood the entire valley. The film documents the slow death of a city, or better, the execution of a city and its people, some of them are fighting to stay until the end, by the state and for the so called progress. The lo-fi aesthetics of DV cameras so fundamental in the development of independent documentary in Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, are here used at their best. An ideal sequel, Before the Flood II – Gong Tan, a documentary about another city soon to be destroyed by the construction of a dam, was completed by Yu Yan in 2009.
Filmmaking and the Way to the Village (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1973). A relatively short documentary, just less than an hour, directed by a member of the Ogawa collective, about the making of the group’s masterpiece, Sanrizuka: Heta Village (1973). Fukuda left the collective after completing this film, decided to stay in the area, and kept making documentaries, for instance A Grasscutter’s Tale (1985). I revisited the documentary after long time, and it was even better than I remembered, years spent watching the films of Ogawa and reading about them, gave me a different perspective on them. The movie offers a glimpse behind the curtain, so to speak, of course you need to be familiar with Ogawa Pro’s filmography and its story, but it’s nonetheless an invaluable document to understand how Heta Village came into existence. The scenes when the collective discusses how the old people of the village enjoy long takes are priceless. It was fascinating also to see how important and integral to the success and reception of the Sanrizuka Series were the screenings. In a pre mini-theaters/independent cinemas era, all the screenings throughout Japan were organized through a network of activists, unions, supporters, people as important for the movies, as the crew that made them.
Last June, Kobe Planet Film Archive organised a special programme dedicated to the works of filmmaker Takahashi Ichirō and producer-director Ukumori Noritae, two key figures in the development of independent film culture in the Kansai region over the past fifty years. Both passed away in 2021, and many of their works were donated to the Kobe Planet Film Archive. The memorial event focused on the films produced by Eiga seisaku iinkai, a film production committee formed by a group of citizens in 1985, and those made by 8 no kai, a collective formed in 1970 by a diverse group of people, amateur filmmakers and industry professionals, who set up an office in Sakuranomiya, Osaka. Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups.
Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups. As far as I could tell from the few films I was able to see and the leaflet I was given, 8 no kai and Eiga seisaku iinkai – the latter of which seems to be still still active – mainly produced films dealing with environmental and social issues, with a strong focus on grassroots activism in Kansai and the surrounding areas.
The first film I saw was 原発はいま Genpatsu wa ima (Nuclear Power Now), directed in 1982 by Ōmi Michihiro and scripted by Takahashi. The movie exposes not only the myth of the nuclear power’s safety, shattered by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, and the release of radioactivity, at first denied and covered up, at the Tsuruga Nuclear Plant in 1981, but more importantly represents an exposure of how labor work in the nuclear facilities was, and still is, exploited. The film, produced by 8 no kai, covers the struggles and protests of workers at a couple of nuclear power plants, active at the time of filming, in areas such as Mihama, Ōi and Takahama in Fukui Prefecture—the area with the highest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world, producing energy mainly for Kansai and its urban sprawl— Kubokawa in Kochi Prefecture, and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture. Examining the reality of the subcontracted workers and their horrific working conditions, the documentary could be paired, in an ideal double bill, with Morisaki Azuma’s 生きてるうちが花なのよ 死んだらそれまでよ党宣言 Nuclear Gypsies (1985), an incredible piece of fiction revolving, among other things, around the life of nuclear gypsies, or with the less known documentary いま原子力発電は Nuclear Power Plants Now directed by Haneda Sumiko in 1976.
My second film was 生命ある限り As long as there is life (1988), a work directed by Takahashi and produced by 8 no kai, about the tragedy of the atomic bombing and the hope for peace, as told by people gathered annually at the meeting of the Hyogo Prefectural Council of Atomic Bomb Survivors. The movie is made of a collection of testimonies and interviews of the people living in Hyogo, people who were affected directly or indirectly by the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The last movie at the screening event for me was 風ものがたり 食と農と環境 The Wind Story: Food, Farming and the Environment (1995), directed by Takahashi, produced by Ukumori Noritate, and backed by Eiga seisaku iinkai. This is the final film in an environmental-themed trilogy directed by Takahashi between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, started with 24000年の方舟 24000 Years of the Ark in 1986, continued in 1991 with 奇妙な出来事アトピー The Strange Event of Atopy, and completed with The Wind Story. The movie is narrated by famous actor Yūsuke Kawazu, who passed away last February and who has been a very popular face in films and TV in the last sixty years, and features and focuses on three similar environmental experiences. A young couple of full-time farmers living and working in Ikeda, a small mountain village in Fukui prefecture, a joint group of producers and consumers in Takefu, again a city in Fukui, and a group of consumers and activists living in Osaka. All these people share a sensibility towards a life lived with a strong awareness of the interconnection existing between the humans and the elements around them, such as soil, water, mountains, plants, other animals, and so on. The common thread running throughout the short documentary, it is less than an hour long, is the relationship between the soil and the food grown on it and consumed by the inhabitants, a philosophy encapsulated in the motto, often seen and heard in the documentary, “Soil is Life”. Filmed with an interesting visual flair and with a joyful, and sometime loud, soundtrack that almost recalls the folk singers of the 1970s, the most interesting part of the documentary was for me the one about the family in Ikeda. By cultivating rice in a narrow space of land between two mountains and adapting to the physical conditions of the territory, it reminded me of Satoyama, an important concept in Japanese culture, famously and overtly present in two works of Studio Ghibli, Totoro (1988) and Only Yesterday (1991), but also in other documentaries made in the archipelago.
Discovering these two groups was a refreshing experience for me, one that intensified my interest in filmmaking conceptualized and done on a local level, in connection with the territory. A type of documentary that often flies under the radar, because it embodies a different idea of filmmaking and documentary, not always lavish, spectacular, and without high production values. At the same time I don’t think it can be called pure video activism, there is a political message at its core of course, but at least in the three films I’ve seen, there’s also a special care towards creating a story, an alternative narrative, to capture the viewers and make them part of a community. I don’t know for sure how these documentaries were screened in the 1980s or 1990s, probably in city halls, community centers, other kind of public or private spaces, or even in few selected mini-theaters, but it’s fascinating, and this is my opinion and personal reading of it, how this exhibition through alternative venues, while minor in scale and numbers, gave them an enhanced resonance and different type of reception. The relationship between documentary filmmaking and its exhibition practices, in the past, but also nowadays, in Japan, but also in the rest of Asia, is a very interesting topic worth a research and an in-depth analysis.
As usual, the list below is a reflection of my taste, interests, and viewing habits during 2021, this year mainly, but not exclusively, online. I’m not sure all the titles can be considered documentaries, but this is, after all, the fascinating beauty of dealing with documentary cinema. Synopsys in italics, followed by my quick take and, when available, the trailer:
Kanarta – Alive in Dreams (Ōta Akimi). Sebastian and Pastora live in a Shuar village in the upper Amazonia of Ecuador. Sebastian is not only a respected healer, but also a medicinal botanist who experiments with unknown plants he encounters in the forest. His unique practice seeks to cultivate new knowledge, reconnecting him with his ancestors. Pastora is one of the rare female leaders in Amazonia, who struggles to negotiate with local authorities for her community. With powerful plants such as ayahuasca, they revive and energise their perceptions of the future. These plants allow them to acquire power and a faith to cope with the obstacles they now face, given that their lives have been irreversibly affected by the modern state system. There is a lot to like about this movie, and, like in the best works that cross the boundaries between documentary, visual anthropology and experimental cinema, every new viewing reveals extra layers. On the one hand Kanarta shows the problems Shuar people and their culture encounter in dealing with modern society and the way their community adapts and changes in response. On the other, it also offers a glimpse of their being part, almost as if made by the same flesh, of the Amazon forest, and their vital connection with the medicinal plants, “plants that make reality” as one of the people suggests. However, what really kept me engaged throughout the whole movie is that the documentary is permeated by joy, there are lots of laughs and funny scenes, usually fuelled by chicha, an alcoholic beverage made of fermented potatoes. The joy is also coming from the movie and its protagonists being in a constant state of exploration, through the visions and through the wandering in the forest in search for new plants or new places where to build a house. Kanarta offers also some emotional and even dramatic scenes, it’s very touching for instance, when we see Sebastian’s son receiving his medical diploma during a small ceremony, and father and mother posing with him for the camera with pride and smiles. This contributes to build a stronger sense of attachment for the two protagonists, Sebastian and Pastora, who are willing to show and tell the director about their culture and their way of living. The main reason why everything works though—from the more poetic scenes, to the more visceral ones, when Sebastian takes ayahuasca for instance—is because the documentary is structured in a dialogic manner, so to speak. The camera is not a passive actor in the scenes, but it’s part of, and often influences, what is going on, directly or indirectly. Furthermore, Ōta is very good at transmitting, through an immersive visual and sensorial experience, the powerful feeling of empathy that emanates from Sebastian and Pastora, and the Amazon forest itself.
13 (Isobe Shinya) The filmmaker left his camera in exactly the same spot for five years to shoot a picture of the sunset every thirteen seconds. In a series of merged time-lapses, we see the sun(s) moving repeatedly from the left part of the screen to the right. One of the best movies I’ve seen this year, documentary or not, I wrote about it here.
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Inside The Red Brick Wall (Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers) On 17 November 2019, the police laid siege to protestors at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in a blockade lasting nearly two weeks. Beleaguered students fought teargas with makeshift whiteboard shields, hoping to escape and return home to safety. With the media barred from on-site access, an anonymous collective films from within the campus, recording the teenage protesters’ hopes and distress. From the very first shot the documentary is imbued with a sense of precariousness and anger, and by filming the violence between riot police, students, aid people, and members of the press —mainly independent press that live-streamed the battles on the internet— captures and creates, through a masterful use of editing, a very powerful sense of space and proximity with the students, a visual cartography of violence and resistance. The scenes when many of the young students break down, cry and walk out, defeated, from the campus, often criticized by their comrades, is— although it is something I have seen over and over again in the documentaries about the Japanese protests of the 1960s and 1970s—heartbreaking. What is also extremely fascinating for me, is that all the young people wearing masks and gear, for protection and for anonymity, form, more than a revolt of the individuals, a resistance of the multitude. The sense that the struggle is about something bigger than the siege itself is very palpable.
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Minamata Mandala (Hara Kazuo) After years of dumping industrial wastes from the factory to the ocean, Chissō Chemical Corporation contaminated the area of a small Japanese fishing village with excessive amounts of methylmercury. This highly toxic chemical bioaccumulated in fishes of the local water, which when consumed by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning. In 1977, Minamata disease certification criteria was set by a strange method that tried not to recognize the rights of environmental disease patients. However, an Osaka court won the case for some patients because of a newly developed theory by medical doctors’ recent experiments and proofs. For decades, these patients struggled within the Japanese judicial system for their rights to receive compensation as victims of environmental disease. Those different aspects of these patients’ lives have been filmed by director Hara for the last 15 years, inspired by the late director Tsuchimoto’s documentary MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971). Not a minute of the documentary (it’s 373′ long) is superfluous. This is, in my view, one of Hara’s best works, and so far the pinnacle of the second part of his career as a filmmaker.
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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter, Anders Edström) An eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. It is a geographic description of the work and non-work of a farmer. A portrait, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a soundscape, and of duration itself. Undeniably it’s an impressive cinematic achievement and is worth engaging with it, but for me, once the “artificiality” of the movie becomes apparent, it loses part of the appeal and power. I’m not revealing more to avoid spoilers (but are there really spoilers?). Also, I’m approaching the movie from a special angle: I live in Japan, in a somehow similar place to the one depicted in the film. All that being said, the soundscape is astounding, and I like how the movie’s editing is often constructed following the sounds. I really should, and I wish to one day, experience it in a theater.
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Soup and Ideology (Yang Yong-hi) Confronting half of her mother’s life—her mother who had survived the Jeju April 3 Incident—the director tries to scoop out disappearing memories. A tale of family, which carries on from Dear Pyongyang, carving out the cruelty of history, and questioning the precarious existence of the nation-state. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues to explore how her own personal life is tragically connected to the post war history of Japan and Korea. The movie presents not only the painful memories of the Jeju massacre (April 3rd 1948) as remembered by the director’s mother, and the destruction a family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but it is also an emotional portrait of her frail and ageing mother. As the film progresses she is diagnosed with senile dementia, and little by little she loses her memories, including those of the massacre she witnessed, only 18, in the small Korean island. The movie is also partly an act of self-reflection by Yang Yonghi herself, if in the first part she is the one filming her mother, and we don’t really see her too much, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame more often, and becomes the co-protagonist of the film. We can clearly see her emotions, especially when she visits the island, with mother and husband, for the anniversary of the massacre. There, Yang Yonghi understands that her mother’s affiliation and attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her for, was also caused by the atrocities committed by the South Korean Army her mother saw with her own eyes. It would have been a better movie for me, had not been for the five or so minutes of animation used to explain her mother story in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment out of place and it really took me out of the movie.
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Shiver (Toyoda Toshiaki) A music movie featuring a performance of Taiko Performing Arts Ensemble ‘Kodo’ and Koshiro Hino. Filmed entirely on Sado island. Partly a filmed music performance, partly a visual experiment connecting music, landscape and spirituality, Shiver is a fascinating piece of work that fits perfectly with what Toyoda has being creating in recent years. Through the spiritual encounter between Sado landscape and the hypnotic music of the taiko drummers, Toyoda touches and expands some of the themes tackled in some of his most recent films, such as the The Blood of Rebirth, Monsters Club, and The Day of Destruction. That is, the primal nature of the world we inhabit, and how we, humans, can connect with it through music, a similar approach was also at the core of Planetist in 2020. Something primal not in a temporal sense as something that comes before, or ancestral, but more as something essential that is always present and awaits to be discovered and brought to light. Like the rock/monolith towards the end of the work, which seems to have some kind of energy inside, and whose light is filtering through the cracks only when the music plays.
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Whiplash of the Dead (Daishima Haruhiko) Weaving together the memories of Yamazaki Hiroaki, a university student who lost his life in the First Haneda Struggle in 1967 through the words of his bereaved family and ex-classmates, this film turns the memories of those who protested against government power into questions for the future. The movie is comprised of two parts, for a total of 200 minutes, in the first 90 minutes the director focuses on the events preceding the death of Yamazaki, while in the second segment, that could easily have been another movie, the protagonists of the students protests of the late 1960s, reflect on the reasons of the implosion of the new left and its movements. The story of the Mito family, not affiliated with any left group, but a family that helped the young people in prison, and later promoted anti-nuclear activism and whose members (father and two sons) tragically died in 1986 in a mountain incident, is so fascinating that would deserve its own documentary.
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Discovery of the year: Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971). The camera slowly zooms, in over a long period of time, on the light of the sun reflected in the mirror of a bicycle parked at the construction site. To this is added a slowly evolving flicker effect derived from negative-positive reversals, progressively dismantling the distance from the subject. Nakai created a masking film with a calculated pattern of black and white frames into which he inserted positive and negative images and made a print out of two separate rolls of film. The original projection speed was 16 frames per second, but the sound is separate from the open-roll tape rather than burned in, so it can also be screened at 24fps. Also, the original sound consisted of the friction noise of rubbing steel, but in 2019 a new version of the sound was created featuring the friction noise of glass. Two versions of the film exist: 24:15 mins at 24 fps and 40 mins at 16 fps. A structuralist film made in 1971 by Nakai, clearly inspired by Michael Snow’s Wavelength, but at the same time highly original, and somehow anticipating Matsumoto’s Atman.
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Honourable mentions: Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito), Summer of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove)
In a peripheral corner of Japanese cinema, one where experimental film, photography, and documentary film encounter, overlap, and merge, there seem to be a thread connecting some films made by different artists in different eras. Alchemy (Nakai Tsuneo, 1971) and Heliography (Yamazaki Hiroshi, 1979), but also parts of Magino Village: A Tale (Ogawa Shinsuke, 1986) and Gootariputra (Yamazaki Mikio, 1999), just to name a few, all share a common fascination for, and a total cinematic dedication to the Sun, its path, and its astral movements in the sky.
The photographer and filmmaker Yamazaki Hiroshi (1946-2017) is particularly important in this context, in the past I wrote about Heliography, here, and on his photographic works, here. After having dedicated a large part of his career to the creation of long-exposure photographs of the sun, Yamazaki in 1979 crowned this artistic path with the short film Heliography, one of the most important experimental films in the history of the genre in Japan. In the work, as the title indicates, the sun is placed at the center of the filmed universe, while everything else moves around it, horizon, sky and city. A visual and artistic vertigo that in the following years evolved and took a similar path when Yamazaki collaborated with Ogawa Production. Yamazaki went to Yamagata prefecture and for the collective filmed the time-lapse sequences of the Sun for the masterpiece Magino Village: A Tale (1986).
This “solar community” has now a new practitioner, Isobe Shinya. In 13 the young Japanese filmmaker left his camera in exactly the same spot for five years to shoot a picture of the sunset every thirteen seconds. In a series of merged time-lapses, we see the sun(s) moving repeatedly from the left part of the screen to the right. Superimposing these images collected over half a decade, Isobe created a work where the sky, while going through a series of permutation in colours, from black to purple, from red to blue, is also being slowly populated by fluorescent dots, the sun(s), gradually clustering the screen.
13 begins with a black screen and without sound, but soon the sun(s) and other drapes of light begin to appear from the upper left corner. As the progression and arcs of the sun(s) get faster, the images are paired first with a what could be described as a sort of background noise, and as the film moves along, with a soundscape composed of accelerating instrumental music. This musical progression peaks with the arrival on screen of a C-shaped cluster of sun(s), a sensorial explosion in a screen now transformed almost into a pink canvas perforated by a multitude of blinding lights. 13 offers a vision of the cosmos and of life conceived as the alternation of solar cycles, and this passage of time – the years, the sun(s), the skies – is condensed and visualised in its 10 minutes with an intense and almost haptic quality. The travel in time that 13 represents, the creation of a different time, could be also read as a travel in space: from the deep darkness of the first images, the journey passes through different phases and different colours of the universe – the sky – to land, in the last minute or so, again on planet earth. The sun(s) turn here into a singular Sun, and the purple, red and pink skies make way to a blue one. We are now back on earth, we can finally see the horizon, the clouds passing, and the shape of a house with its antenna. The singular Sun is setting, concluding its astral path. The film definitely belongs to the same realm of visions created by Yamazaki, and with his solar works, both cinematic and photographic, almost establishes an artistic and long-distance dialogue.
13 has won several awards around the world, and in 2021 has been shown in many festivals, online and in-presence, in the United States and Europe. If you read this in 2021, the film is made available by Isobe himself on Vimeo until December 28th:
At the end of last February, I had the pleasure of interviewing Hamaguchi Ryūsuke about his Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a movie that would debut at the Berlinale. The short interview was conducted on zoom and it was published in the Italian newspaper I usually write for, Il Manifesto.
In recent months, with the release and success of Drive My Car, many long and more in-depth interview with the Japanese director have been published around the world, but I decided nonetheless to translate my interview in English and post it here on the blog (even if it’s not really related to documentary). As said, the conversation was about Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and before the release of Drive My Car. In recent months, with the release and success of Drive My Car, many long and more in-depth interview with the Japanese director have been published around the world, but I decided nonetheless to translate my interview in English and post it here on the blog (even if it’s not really related to documentary). As said, the conversation was about Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and before the release of Drive My Car.
Interview with Hamaguchi Ryūsuke (February 27th, 2021)
Although you had already made short and medium length films in the past, this is the first time you have tackled the anthology film format, could you tell us more about this choice?
A few years ago, I made the medium length film Heaven Is Still Far Away, a project also born out of a collaboration with actresses and actors that for me worked partly as a sort of review of HappyHour, and partly as preparation for my next film, Asako I & II. This experience was also very useful to me because I was able to find my own rhythm, so to speak, in alternating feature films and short or medium length films, something that I think I will continue to do in the future. However, one of the problems with short films is not having a real exhibition outlet, that is, it is very difficult to find a proper distribution for these kinds of works. The solution I tried this time was to combine three shorts into an anthology, making them into a feature film that thus could be distributed.
Compared to feature films, do you think the format you worked on this time opens up different expressive possibilities?
Of course. All works, whether long or short, must have an end, a point at which they stop and leave the viewer with a strong feeling of having seen a world. Having said that, short films have the possibility, in my opinion, to leave a more intense and vivid impression as they only offer a brief glimpse into a certain world. A shorter film can also show something rare, events whose existence is not certain, leaving everything in suspense and without going too deep into it.
In each of the three episodes that make up the film there are at least three scenes of strong aesthetic and emotional impact. In Magic (or Something Less Assuring), the first episode, the long initial part with the two women in a taxi, in Door Wide Open the scene where the female protagonist visits the professor and in the last episode, Once Again, the final part with the two women embracing. Each of these scenes uses very different acting styles, yet there are parts in them where the characters, within the narrative, are acting, and where the boundary between what is real in the story and what is acted is ambiguous and fluid. Could you tell us how you worked with the actors to create this ambiguous feeling?
I wanted to create this ambiguity, but I also tried to create a clear sense of ambiguity, so to speak. That is, I wanted to create something defined, but something that can be interpreted in different ways. The fascinating thing for me is that the act of acting itself is ambiguous, and in the three scenes you mentioned, the actresses themselves in the midst of their performances must surely have noticed the ambiguity of the question “what is real?”. One strategy I used to create this ambiguity was, first of all, to write it into the scenes themselves, by inserting the act of acting into the narrative. I could not ask the actors to emphasise the fact that they were acting, it was rather a matter of achieving a very light and thin performance that, as in the case of the two women in the taxi, could later be read differently in the continuation of the story, when more information is revealed to us. In addition, it is important that there is something hidden in the performance, as happens for example in the second episode where even the main character, Nao, realises that she does not know exactly why she is doing what she is doing, thus generating a sense of displacement in the scene.
The third episode is set in a world where a computer virus has made the internet unusable. Could you tell us more about the reasons for this choice?
I shot the first two segments in 2019 and the last one in 2020. I originally planned to shoot it in spring, but the pandemic disrupted all the plans and we ended up shooting it in summer. The script was already completed, but an event as big as the pandemic made me tweak it. I couldn’t avoid taking into account the effect the Corona virus had on all of us, so I decided to set it in a kind of parallel world where the internet is no longer usable, a world disrupted by a different kind of calamity.
One last question about the situation of independent cinemas (mini-theaters) in Japan at the time of the pandemic, a culture that is very close to your heart and for which you are fighting with various initiatives, such as Mini-Theater Aid (crowdfunding that helped these small cinemas survive last year and that is still active with various support initiatives). What is your relationship with these independent theatres?
For me, they have been an important place to discover films that are completely different from the Hollywood films or TV series I was used to, films that were “boring” compared to the ones I used to see. Seeing these “boring” films in the space of these small independent theatres, I discovered a new kind of feeling, my body changed and I learned to appreciate a different kind of cinema. Now my films are shown here in Japan, mainly in these independent theatres, and I am in contact with all the people working there, it is for these reasons that I have been actively participating and supporting projects like Mini-Theater Aid.
Third part (you can read the first part here and second here)
A slightly different post today, since it’s not about Haneda Sumiko’s own writings, but more about one of Haneda’s documentary, and one of the most significant in her career, Ode to Mt. Hayachine 早池峰の賦 (a.k.a. The Poem of Hayachine Valley). The movie was released in 1982 at the Iwanami Hall, distributed by Equipe de Cinema, where it stayed from May 29th to June 25th (and later from August 7th to 13th). A booklet about Haneda and the movie was published and sold at the theater, in it there are various writings by Haneda, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, people of the village in Iwate, and Paulo Rocha, among others. The Portuguese director, with whom Haneda collaborated as a screenwriter for a segment of his A Ilha dos Amores (released at the Iwanami Hall in December 1983), wrote an interesting piece on Ode to Mt. Hayachine; you can read my translation below (NOTE: This is by no means a professional translation, but I hope the readers can get the gist of it):
Paulo Rocha on Ode to Mt. Hayachine
In an Italian film similar to this one, L’albero degli zoccoli / The Tree of Wooden Clogs, director Ermanno Olmi told us, with rare insight, about the heart and the inner world of Italian peasants. Haneda goes here even further, for her, it is not only the heart of the people who speaks in her movie, but it is as the whole of nature, trees and stones, were speaking to us. Although we are in 1982, immersed in our contemporary problems, at the same time, we live with simplicity in an uncomplicated world that has just been created right now. There is a difference between Olmi and Haneda, and it may be a difference that exists between a country with a Catholic tradition and a country with a Shinto tradition, but still there is a miracle that is common to the two. This miracle is that in their clear mind everything is sublimated and yet, a direct and spontaneous force, an inspiration and a beauty in the detachment of modern daily life is gradually invading our hearts. For Haneda, the mountain gods, the plastic products in the small shops in the village, the people who dance the kagura, and the tourists are just as passionate and fantastic. Everything is just as important to her non-sentimental gaze. That is, past and future, nature and machinery, mountains and towns. What is art for, what is fiction for, what position does the profilmic material occupy in a movie, what position does fiction occupy in art? What about the artist? What happens to the artists filmed? Rarely in the history of cinema have such essential questions been asked in such a direct, simple, generous, and intelligent way. I am a filmmaker, and until now I believed that I would be closer to the truth if I approached it through fiction, but now, after seeing Haneda’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I realize that the idea is an arrogant one, we must take advantage of this opportunity, we must learn to see reality correctly in order to know the truth. Ode to Mt. Hayachine gave us the best example of this. In Europe, documentary films are being re-evaluated as part of a movement for a new type of cinema. If Ode to Mt. Hayachine were to be introduced in Europe, they would no doubt be surprised and respectful to find that the path they were looking for already existed in Japan. Centuries from now, when people in the future will want to know what we were like, they will be able to watch Ode to Mt. Hayachine, and the movie will tell them about us, the audience of the film today, and about little-known people who were lost among the mountains, in an unknown valley.
The 2021 edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has ended last Thursday. Like many other events in the past two years, the festival took place exclusively online, this is the second and final dispatch, you can read the first one here.
This is the list of the movies awarded:
The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize): Inside the Red Brick Wall
The Mayor’s Prize: Camagroga
Awards of Excellence: City Hall , Night Shot
Ogawa Shinsuke Prize: Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege
Awards of Excellence: Three Songs for Benazir, Makeup Artist
Special Mention: Broken,
Citizens’ Prizes: Writing With Fire
(Synopses are from the official homepage of the festival)
Wuhan, I Am Here (2021, Lan Bo) A film crew that had traveled to Wuhan to make a fiction film is confronted with the sudden lockdown of the city and decides to go film in the streets. They race through the city, joining forces with volunteers who are offering free resources collected through the internet to the elderly and the homeless. The director and his troupe were able to capture on camera the chaos, tensions, fears and pain experienced by the citizens of Wuhan during the first lockdown of the city, in the first months of 2020. A woman crying on a sidewalk because her husband, at home with cancer, cannot be hospitalised due the Covid situation. A group of volunteers distributing food to the various communities of elderly, but often halted and contested because of bureaucracy and the lack of passes. People denied their right to visit relatives in hospital…the documentary is about stories of struggle and grief, death is very present in the film, stories we all became accustomed to witness in the last two years. This is a documentary whose appeal and point of interest will probably increase with the passing of time, when one day, hopefully, we will look back at the pandemic days and reflect on this huge historical juncture.
Three Songs for Benazir (2021, Gulistan Mirzaei, Elizabeth Mirzaei) In a camp for displaced persons in Kabul, a young man sings for his beloved wife Benazir as if the whole world was theirs alone. We see him next four years later, facing the consequences of the path he was forced to choose in providing for his family, after his struggle to find work. In just twenty two minutes the film says more about contemporary Afghanistan than a dozen newspaper articles about the subject.
Three Songs for Benazir
Soup and Ideology (2021, Yang Yonghi) Yang Yonghi is a zainichi director born and rised in Osaka. When her father passed away in 2009, of her family, only her mother and herself were left in Japan. The director who now lives in Tokyo, is worried about her aged mother living alone, so she visits her home in Osaka every month. One day, the mother suddenly tells her that she had experienced the Jeju uprising as a young woman. Her memories of the tragic event, buried deep in her heart, resurfaced and came back to life. She begins to talk specifically about how she got involved in the Jeju uprising. With her latest documentary Yang Yonghi continues her exploration of her family history and the history of the two countries she is connected with, Japan and North Korea. The movie opens in 2018, with her mother lying on a bed remembering the killings and the dead bodies piled along the roads, as she was escaping from Jeju island in 1948. Soup and Ideology is a very touching viewing experience, and on many different levels. The movie presents not only the painful memories of the Jeju massacre (April 3rd 1948) as remembered by the director’s mother, and the destruction of her family, her three brothers were sent from Japan to North Korea at a young age, but also an emotional portrait of her frail and old mother, as a Korean who grew up in Japan worshipping North Korea. As the film progresses she is diagnosed with senile dementia, and little by little she loses her memories, including those of the massacre she witnessed, only 18, in the small Korean island. The movie is also partly an act of self-reflection by Yang Yonghi herself, if in the first part she is the one filming her mother, in the second, when her mother condition worsens, she enters the frame, so to speak. We can clearly see her emotions, especially when she visits the island, with mother and husband, for the anniversary of the massacre. There Yang Yonghi understands that her mother’s affiliation/attraction for North Korea, something the director had never completely forgiven her and her father for, was also partly caused by the atrocities committed by the ROK her mother saw with her own eyes. It would have been a better movie for me, had not been for the five or so minutes of animation used to explain her mother story and the historical situation in Jeju in 1948. I found the segment unnatural and it really took me out of the movie. The soup of the title is a dish that her mother usually prepares, and that is later cooked by Yang Yonghi’s Japanese husband, we see the first meeting between her mother and him in one of the first scenes of the movie, as a way of entering or belonging to her wife’s family, the director parents had always wanted her to married exclusively a North Korean national. Soup and Ideology is important piece of documentary and was one of the highlights of the festival for me.
Soup and Ideology
Other documentaries I’ve watched: The Buddha Mummies of North Japan (2017, Watanabe Satoshi), about the practice of sokushinbutsu orself-mummification through which some mountain monks, usually related to Shugendō, are believed to have attained satori. The World’s “Top” Theater (2017, Satō Kōichi), a fascinating trip into post-war film culture in Yamagata, the film focuses on the Green Room, a cinema in Sakata City that was completely destroyed in a fire in 1976. Before the Dying of the Light (2020, Ali Essafi); Dorm (2021, So Yo-hen), partly documentary and partly performance/reenactment, female Vietnamese laborers arrive at a dormitory in Taiwan. Creative and surprising the finale.
Some final thoughts. After going to Yamagata for almost a decade, it was a very singular experience to join the festival online—the system adopted, with movies available only in Japan and at certain time, like in the in-presence edition, raised more than a doubt (I had a press pass, but I will write more on this in the following weeks). Of course I missed the people, the discussions, the city itself, experiencing the movies on a big screen, the food and the drinks, however, the festival turned out to be a satisfying experience. Of the works I watched, a couple were outstanding, but each one was interesting in its own way. Yamagata is, among other things, a nice occasion to reflect on what happened in the documentary world in the past two years, with a particular focus on Asia: new trends and new voices, but also how the cinema of the real captured, mirrored, and represented the events that took place around the globe. See you in two years Yamagata!
Asian Docs 
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